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Comment by throwawaycuz | Hacker News Reader

Serious question, could someone please educate me.

1) How is Net Neutrality different from a slippery slope to communism?

2) During the President Obama years, my ISP in the U.S. offered 3 different tiers of service at 3 different prices. How is that pure "net neutrality"? (this was similar to the situation where in the U.S., rich lefty-liberals don't send their kids to public schools... but want poor conservatives to send their kids to public schools, rich lefty-liberals don't want public housing built in their neighborhoods... etc. etc... but still want to virtue signal that they're in favor of public education and public housing)

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We've banned this account for starting ideological flamewars. If you keep doing this it will eventually get your main account banned as well.

Out of curiosity, what would banning the main account do?

I guess I understand if the threat of losing it is the impetus to behave well.

I have to imagine it would just drive the user to create more throwaways, though.

Only those of us with the 'showdead' profile setting enabled will see them, though.

1) what?

2) >During the President Obama years, my ISP in the U.S. offered 3 different tiers of service at 3 different prices. How is that pure "net neutrality"?

Well, for one, Title II wasn't enforced during the "President Obama years" that I know of, so there is no difference in what you could have experienced than as what you could experience now. And second, offering different speed tiers has nothing to do with net neutrality, as long as that speed applied neutrally to all content you can access over the internet.

Exactly. Speed != Quality of Service.

1) Net neutrality concerns whether or not it is legal for an ISP to provide more bandwidth and faster service to some websites while providing less bandwidth and speed to other websites. Net neutrality is about who gets fast service and who gets slow service, with fast service being something that can be bought. Communism has to do with ownership of the means of production. ISPs will still be owning access to the internet, so it's not communism.

2. Your ISP offering three different tiers of internet is like being able to buy three different priced cars. That is perfectly OK and has nothing to do with Net Neutrality. However, if you had to pay $3/mile to drive in one highway lane that had no speed limit, that would be like net neutrality.

It seems like you're polarized over left/right politics and don't really understand net neutrality at all.

1. At present ISPs have monopoly or near monopoly status over the vast majority of the US and are destroying competition in the marketplace through anti-competitive means. To protect the free market they must either be broken up or strongly regulated.

I'd like to point out that "strongly regulated" in this case is still far less regulation than current water or power utilities enjoy. Do you consider those regulations, that have been around for decades, a "slippery slope into communism?" Is the government telling your electric utility that they can't charge you differently for using your refrigerator vs using your lights "communist"?

2. It isn't net neutrality at all, or even related. Net neutrality is the principle that packets are not prioritized. If I want to watch Netflix instead of Comcast's video service, I should be able to utilize my full bandwidth to do so.

1) I suppose you could consider this "towards communism" in the sense that it takes power from individuals and gives it to "the people" (i.e., the government). However, it seems no different than utility regulation to me, and the slope certainly doesn't seem slippery (a slippery slope argument only works if each successive step begets the next one).

2) In the situation you laid out, the speed you're paying for is the same speed no matter who you are connecting to. Without net neutrality, you will get different speeds depending on who is on the other end of your connection.

Comunism is about giving power to the people but it is not about giving power to the government, in fact in Comunism there is no state anymore, at least that's how Marx and Engels envisioned it.

1) Communism is a belief in the overthrow of existing power relationships through violent revolution, in which the working class seizes the means of production. Net neutrality is a regulatory proposal within an established republican system of government.

2) The 'neutrality' in net neutrality refers to not privileging traffic based on its origin. It has nothing to do with things like different connection speeds.

Net neutrality is about getting exactly what you pay for. For example if you pay for 100MBps connection you should get 100Mbps regardless of any site you access. You don't want your ISP to decide that Netflix would stream on 20Mbps and Comcast would stream at 100Mbps. This gives us unfair advantages to certain sites which is beyond your control. Worse yet ISP can police which sites you can visit which not with absence of Net Neutrality. So this has nothing to do with communism or also not to be confused with the "right to free internet". Those are all independent topics.

> if you pay for 100MBps connection you should get 100Mbps regardless of any site you access

I'm sorry, but the Internets just don't work that way.

The only way to get guaranteed 100Mbps when crossing a few AS borders', is to have bandwidth SLAs all the way. Which is - as far as I understand it (could be mistaken) - about the opposite of what Net Neutrality proponents seem to stand for.

ISPs can guarantee (or, at least, try to provide) you a certain quality of service within their network, as they have full control over it. They can also try poke their direct peers (whom they have agreements with) to do something if the problem is at some neighboring AS. They can also try to politely ask other systems (hoping they would care to help). But that's about it.

Thats what I am referring to - the certain quality of service and especially no throttling part of it. Of course technically no one can guarantee certain speed, but they can try to hinder it intentionally.

serious question: how is net neutrality a slippery slope to communism? If I was so scared by the commies I would be more concerned about how every capitalist company is now trying to sell you services instead of goods

You say that like it's a bad thing :)

1: Anything can be considered a slippery slope to communism, fascism, etc

2: Your straw man argument relies on a very small subset of the US population and distracts from the issue of net neutrality.

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